Down Under at The Top End!

25 March 2011 – Darwin, NT

Wow, did that week fly by!  It feels like I arrived in Darwin only yesterday and I’m already being whisked away by my own stubborn travel schedule. ;) I could easily stay here for another …year or so (which, I realized, is what happens to many travelers who come here!  I was told that I was wise to book my ticket out before I arrived….something magnetic about this place).  Well, here’s the tale of my trip to the Top End, already halfway around the continent from where I began!

On Saturday I found myself unexpectedly flying towards Alice Springs: a state of surprise altogether unexceptional, considering that it was just the most recent of unexpected events and happy accidents which I had been enjoying over the last couple of days.

I was somewhat reluctant to depart Coral Bay—after having such easy times and hanging out with lots of super people—and it seemed that the Greyhound bus was just as reluctant to pick me up.  Three hours after I had a farewell dinner…then desert…then drinks with Coral Bay friends, I was still waiting on the bus to come and sweep me away on my next adventure.  Some mysterious event had occurred somewhere along the 18-hour route from Perth that resulted in a bus rolling up to the backpackers at 1:45 am, completely empty and without apology.  Would YOU get on that bus?  I was too tired to ask questions, and desperate to get up to Karratha.  Nobody SHOULD be desperate to get to Karratha, by the way.  

 In planning my route from Exmouth to Darwin, I had believed that I had got my transfers perfectly scheduled, with a nice 3-hour window to arrive in the mining town of Karratha and catch my flight to Darwin.  With a 3-hour-late bus, I was a tiny bit worried (and I never worry, right? Haha).  It turned out that the late bus actually SAVED me from having to spend more than 30 minutes in Karratha.  This town was the pits, the only good thing about it was cheap airfare, which catered to the REASON that the town was the pits.  Karratha and its sister-town, Tom Price, are one of Western Australia’s fastest-growing mining towns.  The whole district is owned and run by big mining companies—from apartments to grocery stores to schools—even the taxi I rode in was owned by the mining corporation (much to the chagrin of the driver).  It was a very happy accident, therefore, that the bus dumped me at Mc Donalds at 8am, so that by 8:40am I was safely on board my plane bound for… …Alice Springs??!!

 

It hadn’t occurred to me that a flight from Karratha to Darwin should take 7 hours, but who was I to judge Australian distances?  Nowhere in the airport or on my Qantas ticket did the words Alice Springs appear, so I had assumed that the day’s surprises were done.  Haha, silly Heather...  When the flight attendant gave instructions that “All passengers should exit the aircraft in Alice Springs” I first got a jolt of anxiety—OMG, was I on the right plane?!—but then I felt like I had won some sort of Fabulous Prize!  I could just hear Bob Barker in my head: “Behind Door Number One:  iiiiiittt’s A vacation to the Reeeeeed Centeerrrrr!!” followed by music and applause.  Alice Springs is smack in the middle of Australia, called the Red Center, a name that evokes more images of a sweltering hellish underworld than of a dazzling region of dramatic escarpments, planes, valleys, and some insane seasonal rivers that give rise to the famous billabongs and unique landscapes.  This place was too far from the ocean and thus was excluded from my tour of Australia, but as you can see from my aerial photos, this region is definitely worth a visit!  I was just wish that I had been sitting next to a geologist, as we flew over alien dunes and rivers and mountains!  How stoked was I to get a bonus round to my trip!

I spent an entire Hour in Alice Springs, just long enough to breath the sticky air (we got to walk across the tarmac to the airport and back in the glorious heat), see a short lightning storm (I’m talking a 10-minute drive-by-shooting, pyrotechnic show), and read a pamphlet about etiquette for travelers [Gringos] when interacting with Aboriginals/Indigenous Australians (which was summed up as “If you’re a jerk tourist (which apparently we all are) you should probably just keep your trap shut…oh, and stop throwing your money around, buddy, not everything’s for sale.”  Then it was back onto the plane and THIS time I really was heading due North, to Darwin!

Darwin is fabulous!  Ya gotta love a town that’s only 5x7 blocks in size, and surrounded by lush gardens and 6 distinct bodies of water (Frances Bay, Port Darwin, Lameroo Beach (open Timor Sea), Cullen Bay, Fannie Bay, Beagle Gulf).  I’m visiting at the end of “The Wet”, so the whole region is green and lush, although the air is so thick that one chews it just as much as beathes it.  I love it!  On the Wharf, you can browse $80,000 pearls or have your pick kangaroo, crocodile, or camel meat in burger, fried, or kabob form; and crocodiles in the sewers are actually a tourist attraction (Crocodylus Cove)!  I love it!

 Sunday morning I hit the pavement, then realized quickly that it was Sunday morning…so I mostly walked around until businesses opened up later in the day.  By the time the shops opened at midday, my clothes and I were completely drenched—whether from sweat or condensation, I know not—despite the conspicuous lack of rain.  Therefore, when I entered the Indo-Pacific Marine and Pearl Museum, my “moisture” froze instantly and painfully.  You see, Darwinians (Darwinites?) choose to live their lives entirely WITH or WITHOUT air-con.  Those who work in shops and museums, such as this one, rarely notice that it’s raining and over 90 degrees outside, but are more concerned with which wool sweater to wear, and probably nose-bleeds.  Those who live without A/C are primarily Aboriginal park-dwellers and the most desperate backpackers.   Those who do not choose suffer from both (that would be me), as the opening of every outside door causes one to wince from the sudden temperature and humidity change.

An interesting side note to that park-dweller issue, I found out:  there are lots of Aboriginal folks that hang around the streets and parks of Darwin, and many visitors assume that they are either homeless—which of course is not the case, since there are very few truly “Westernized” Aboriginal city-dwellers—or that they just enjoy the streets.  I learned that many of these people are mostly outcasts from their home tribes/mobs, for either A) breaking any of the thousands of laws imposed on them by the “Two Laws” system or B) had never returned from their adolescent Walkabout for whatever reason (drugs, injuries…video games…).  The Darwin city seems to have a pretty respectful situation going on, at least what I observed during the day, and it’s pretty cool to walk down the street to the rhythm of music sticks and didgeridoos, jams of which echo through the streets, from one group to the next.

But I digress:  this museum was the first thing to open on Sunday, and was of course an item of interest for me (doesn’t everyone design their traveling around parks and museums??), so I suffered the chills for the sake of education!...and shiny pearls.  Darwin is home to Australia’s largest saltwater cultured pearls, known as South Sea Pearls, which are grown to sizes as big as shooter marbles.  The process is really interesting, and this company, Pescales Pearls, does nearly everything on board a couple huge marine vessels that travel out to sea to collect and maintain their oysters, surgically insert the nuclei, then spoil the crap out of these filter-feeders (aka, let them sit for a while in the safety of mesh boxes) until they give up the shiny gems.  Now why didn’t I think of that?  So easy, for such a huge payoff!  I’m still not very interested in buying or wearing pearls, but understanding the process of “biomineralizing money” has me very glad that later this month I will be trying my hand at the industry in Queensland!

On Monday I rented a bike to check out the nearby East Point Reserve and Botanical Gardens, and I saw and immediately fell in love with wallabies and black flying-foxes!  No crocs, which was good for me because I spent most of the morning tidepooling around the reserve.  Darwin experiences tidal ranges of 8-10 meters (that’s 25- 32 feet)!!!!  At low tide, not only do the piers and wharfs look comically leggy, but the rocky intertidal and beaches extend almost forever!!  Being a near-full moon, I headed out near one of the lowest tides of the month to walk around lots of hearty exposed corals, sea cucumbers, beefy tunicates, and delicious-looking swimming crabs.  

Darwin has a very intimate history of WWII involvement, which they are very proud to remember (they were heavily attacked by the Japanese), with ruins and monuments just about everywhere you look in the city and reserve.  All of these grassy lawns with plaques and statues provide ample habitat for the adorable wallabies that graze in the sun all day long.  I loved seeing these mini non-kangaroos hopping back and forth behind bushes and ruins!  I finally caught one off-guard to snap a pic, but they were difficult to chase down!  I also had the pleasure of spending the late afternoon among the rainforest and shady habitats in the Royal Botanic Gardens, where I met those wily flying foxes.  Opinions are split—are they cute or creepy?  I think both, that’s why I like them.  But everyone agrees that they are startlingly large.  They feed on flowers and fruit, but can still give one the heebie-geebies as they swoop around just after sunset and cackle to each other in the dark trees.

Early on Wednesday I joined a 2-day 4WD tour through Kakadu National Park and World Heritage Site.  I was the only North American in the group (in fact, I’ve only met 6 North Americans in this country so far, mostly Canadians.  Talk about being a minority!) but most of the other 16 people  were very pleasant and/or awesome.  Ideally, I would not have planned to take one of these group tours—all the pamphlets in the visitors centers are so off-putting and kinda cheapen the experience by advertising primarily to obnoxious younger backpackers—but as it is the end of the Wet, most of Kakadu is covered in water and public transport was extremely limited.  So my solution was to throw away the ugly pamphlet and book the tour!

 

I can hardly begin to describe the immense beauty and indigenous cultural appeal of Kakadu.  In two days we merely scratched the surface.  Kakadu is intensely seasonal—6 months of flood and bounty and 6 of extreme aridity and fire.  It would take years to experience all of this park’s splendors, since it is so huge and changes so dramatically from month to month.  Because we visited at the end of the Wet, nearly the entire landscape for as far as the eye could see was covered in trees and various types of swamps/billabongs, some places reminiscent of Florida’s Everglades, but mostly a landscape completely wild and new to me!  Our first stop on the tour was a local cultural center just outside the park, where much of the land is now farmed, but where a few tribes still live semi-traditionally.  The caretaker and his daughter, part of the ___ tribe, told us the creation story (dreaming) of the area (the hills and rivers, etc., were formed by the wanderings of a [giant] long-neck turtle) and tried to teach us to play the didgeridoo and other instruments (it looks like I will have to be a music-stick slapper, hehe).  His daughter showed us her tribe’s weaving practices and products—weaving is a women’s secret—including multitudes of dilly bags for various purposes, baskets, seats, and eating plates, all beautifully colored and sealed with local seasonal plants and ochres.  Fantastic!  We also got a great demonstration of the men’s hunting practices:  since the Top End is all forest, they use spear-throwers to nab magpie geese, wallabies, and bandicoots.  They haven’t used boomerangs here since 18,000 ya, when the land transformed from desert to forest (indicated by ancient rock paintings)—boomerangs have little effect on trees and crocs! 

…Which brings me to the paintings!  Kakadu is covered in artwork, and Aboriginal people have been using the same techniques for painting for thousands of years—ochres (ground-up rock), painted with bone, twig and hair tools—and some incredible research has gone into describing and tracing the ages and meanings of the hundreds of thousands of old and ancient images around the park (plus the contemporary paintings, since people still live here!).  All this research is awesome, of course, but to the indigenous painters and their tribes, the images themselves are not sacred or anything.  They think it’s neat that Gringos take such interest, but to them, the act of painting is way more important than the paintings themselves.  They are just glad that the paintings brought the worlds’ eye to the Gagudgu and Arnhem Land region so that it could be preserved.

 

In the afternoon we took some beautiful hikes to visit some of the super-ancient paintings and took a lovely river cruise down the Home Billabong and Alligator River.  The swamp was beautiful and diverse, and while we only saw one crocodile during the whole cruise (a female on a nest, see image), it was clear that we were constantly surrounded:  just the hint of bubbles, startled fishies, or a hearty splash amidst the placid water reminded us that the Top End is home to about 100,000 crocodiles—that’s a little more than the human population!  Meanwhile, we got some close encounters with the avian megafauna: White-Breasted Sea Eagles, Whistling Kites, Magpie Geese, Spoonbills, Royal Ibises, Pied Herons and Egrets, plus “Thousand-Buck Ducks” and JABIRU!!  The gigantic pairs of Jabiru were spectacular, but I think my favorite birdies were the Jacanas:  their bodies are quite small, but their feet are huge, about a quarter of their size!  Their spidery feet help them stalk the lily-pads and floating plants for bugs and fish, while dodging reptile predators (we saw a tile snake make a jump for one wily bird!  Wild!)

We watched the sunset from atop the escarpment, which forms the water catchment for the gigantic flood-planes, with amazing views of the monsoon forest and billabong: SO many shades of green and red and blue, SUCH an amazing time!  Rumor has it that the opening scene of Crocodile Dundee was filmed in Kakadu, most likely the one we looked down upon, but this place would also make a perfect setting for the next Tarzan movie, too!

 

Thursday was filled with lots more great hiking (in humidity-drenched clothes, as always) and bathing in waterfall pools…pretty much right next to signs warning about “Freshies”, or mostly-harmless freshwater crocodiles!  We went way too far upstream to run into any vicious “Salties”, and were probably too loud for any of the Freshies to hang around.  Since the park was getting so much rain, even the minor waterfalls were running full-steam, with amazing deep swimming pools with fish and yabbies.  In fact, the major waterfalls were pumping water so powerfully that they were closed to all vehicles except helicopters and ultralights.  So we were very happy to enjoy the “minor” huge waterfalls!  Dan, our fabulous bush guide took some of us up some rockwalls up to “See a View”, i.e.,  breathtaking rock-top lookouts, where we could check out evidence of how the area had been formed not by floods and rivers, but by coastal erosion ~0.3 mya—fossils, conglomerates and marine sediment, oh my!  …So I got to nerd-out a bit before we headed back down into the monsoon forests, but not before goofing around with some bush-glamour photos! (Even uptight biologists get silly when it’s ridiculously hot and sticky) ;)

As we drove back to Darwin, I was kinda jealous of the Aboriginal people who know how to survive and still thrive in that wonderful world, and who get to live there all the time!  And of course all of us on the truck kept repeating that Kakadu deserves at least a 2-week stay on our NEXT adventure in Oz!  I spent the night in Darwin and caught an early flight to Cairns, where I am hangin’ out today (actually I started writing this on Tuesday, today is Friday) so I can catch another early flight tomorrow to head up to Torres Strait!  I can’t wait to escape to Turtlehead Island, in the mouth of the Escape River on the East Coast.

 

Sorry this was a really long entry!  As always, I hope you are doing well and having your own amazing adventures this Spring!